Ankit Srivastava, who made 45 lakhs from a music player app in such a stiff competition

Ankit Srivastava is a Lucknow-based entrepreneur who founded, La Musique (the media player app). He did Computer science at the Jaypee University of Information Technology.

Creating apps was the thing that appealed more than anything to Ankit and earning money from it was an added incentive for him at the age of twenty.

His music player application La Musique was launched on 8 July 2014 and was named after a French phrase meaning ‘the music’. It acquired more than 3 million downloads and generated a revenue of INR 4,500,000.

In September 2013, at the age of twenty-two, he was enchanted by the music player on his brother’s new Nokia Lumia mobile and he tried searching for a similar music player on his Android phone, but could not find one.

While checking out Google Play for music players, he realized that there are thousands of music player apps having millions of downloads and still there is an opportunity of coming up with new apps of this kind. After sensing such humongous demand for music apps, he thought of building one of his own. In spite of having no money to advertise the application, he began making a music player app.

Developmental phase

In order to make his app, he learned app development on his own from blogs and video tutorials. After 4-5 months of coding, he developed a few features but the design of the app was not that much alluring.

Then he came to know about Dribbble (a community of designers where one can promote, discover and explore design); there he contacted around two-hundred designers but unfortunately, no one was ready to work for him even after being offered 40 % equity.

It was at this point that he put brakes on his app development and started freelancing for 2 months. In the meantime, he continued with his research for various websites related to app designing and finally he was able to finish the app by June 2014. It was ready for launch on Google Play.

Monetising the App

Ankit started generating revenue for the app created by him from ads, sponsors and also by selling usage data. From 2 dollars per day, he worked his way up to 130 dollars per day. The first 6 months got him around 8,000 dollars and in the next one year, he made 50,000 dollars from ads. Once the app was launched, he used Facebook groups to promote the app.

Lucknow-the emerging startup destination

Lucknow is moving beyond its specialties. It seems to be high on embracing the hi-tech startup culture now after having an amazing history, food, fashion, music, and culture.

Hitherto over 68 startups from Lucknow have joined the network of US-based Angel List. This increasing number is breaking down the conventional perception that mega-cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, and Hyderabad are the only places for tech startups.